Renaud Charpentier, Olivier Lesaint, Eric Bourderau. Insight Games (www.insightgames.com).
Defender & Warden Starter Pack 1 (12.80 euros) Swordmaster & Defiler Starter Pack 2 (12.80 euros) Shade & Elementalist Starter Pack 3 (12.80 euros) Noloc, Shulius & Makual Adventure Pack 1 (14.80 euros)
You'll need percentile dice and 2d6 to play.
Summary
Corunea is an unusual game. Insight Games calls it a "Role Card Game," a cross between a collectable card game and a role playing game. I can’t argue with the collectable card game, but the role playing is limited and the focus is squarely on combat. Players build a deck to represent their character, and characters battle one another at various locations. Adventures consist of going through piles of cards and meeting adversaries, but more commonly battling other characters until victory conditions are met.
The simplest version of the game is an arena combat, where players go head to head in battle. The adventure game builds on the arena games.
The Cards
These are conventional CCG cards, more beautiful than most, in my opinion. I think the landscapes and scenery cards are utterly gorgeous. Go to the website and see! www.corunea.com I’ll wait.
Really. Go to the website. Do I have a point?
Building a Character/Deck
To construct a character, a player starts with a character card. This card has nearly all of the character’s stats on it (scores for attack, movement, magic, etc.) plus the character’s basic hit points and mental ability. The card also gives the character’s name, racial type, and class. Classes include warrior types (Swordmasters and Defenders), spellcasters (Defilers and Elementalists), and mixed types (Wardens and Shades). Each character has a matching Positional card used to show his or her location on the field. Characters must also have an Allegiance card, which defines which of the four alignments they will champion: Chaos, Fallen, Elemental, and Wild. Most characters are limited in which alignments they can choose, and this is shown on their character card. Once the character has an Allegiance card, they take a Sanctuary card that matches the Allegiance.
Legal decks have fifty to sixty cards. The rest of the deck is made up of Items (weapons and equipment for the character to use), spells, effects, and so on. Many of the cards will be filler, of no direct use in play, but that’s useful because many cards will be used simply as point markers, and you’ll want junk cards to fulfill these roles.
The Arena
In each turn, your character may attack, use a missile or thrown weapon, cast a spell (called “using channels” in Corunea), recover, or try to change position around the arena. The basic mechanic is to roll equal to or less than the target number on your card with percentile dice (not included with the game). In an opposed action, your opponent also rolls against their target number. If you succeed and your opponent fails, the desired effect occurs. There are also criticals: if you roll ten percent of your success score or less (for example, if your skill was sixty, you get a critical on six or less), you gain additional benefits.
There are many opportunities to modify die rolls. Target numbers may be modified by the weapon or spell used, the distance to the target, play of cards in your hand, and so forth. One feature of Corunea is that you can play cards to modify the target number after you roll the dice and see what happens. You can also reroll just about anything once by spending Faharn, the magical energy of the game.
Combat is weighted toward the defense. If the defender succeeds on their defense roll, the attack is blocked. If the armor roll is better than the damage roll, no damage gets through. If any damage does get through, the defense gets an additional “sustain” roll, which halves the damage taken. A character with a high defense score is hard to hit, and one with good armor is difficult to damage. But you can do more than simply try to bludgeon your way through your foe's defenses, hoping for a critical hit.
A successful hit, whether it causes damage or not, gives the opportunity for mischief. You can play additional effects on your opponent, such as a card that puts them into an unfavorable position in the arena, or reduces their armor's effectiveness, or causes them to drop a weapon, and so on. A hit that causes damage allows you to add poison to the wound or cause other problems. Thus, some characters will be brutal sluggers, while others can finesse their opponents to death: drop their shield, daze them with a head blow, and then stab them with a poisoned blade. Many cards are discarded after use, so a player must have a good sense of timing. Different effects have slightly different rules for placement, but once you understand the system, it’s straightforward and logical.
The initiative card is a nice touch. The player with the initiative goes first in a round, and then gets to choose which player goes next, which is relevant in multiplayer games. When you score a hit, whether you do damage or not, you take the initiative card, so that there’s a feel for who is controlling the combat. Possession of the initiative card also grants you a free reroll of the dice without spending a Faharn point, or an opportunity to boost your skill by ten points.
Laying Out Your Cards
First, players must agree on the arena. There are three different arenas, one for each starter pack, and each is a little different. The smallest arena, The Blood Cage of Aran, only permits two players, characters can only be in contact or at medium range, and players have a slightly smaller allotment of equipment and less control over the contents of their hand. The largest arena, the Grand Arena of Inel, permits up to four players (but with four, one must play two teams of two), characters can be in contact, at medium range, or at long range, and players get slightly more equipment and more control over their hand.
Once the setting is decided on, the players lay their characters out on the table: character card, allegiance (the only card that determines a character ability not on the character card: the character’s Faharn reserve), and sanctuary, which serves little role here. Players then choose and lay down what their character will carry into the arena. Equipment includes weapons, spells, shields, and bandages, each of them rated in point cost. The two smaller arenas permit only five points worth of equipment, while the Grand Arena permits six points. Players then choose cards from their deck that will be part of their hand, the exact number determined by the arena (four in the smallest, five in the rest). The remainder of the ten card hand is drawn at random from the deck.
Here’s a clever touch: the deck also serves to mark life and Faharn points. By laying down cards in an overlapping line, you can show a line of red dots, two per card when you fan them left, and two silver dots per card when you fan them right. Turn the top card ninety degrees, and it shows a single dot of the right color. Red dots are used to mark the character’s life points, and the silver mark the character’s Faharn. As you lose points, these cards are discarded. Recover points, and the needed cards are drawn from the deck.
As noted above, Faharn may be spent to re-roll a bad result. Faharn is also used to cast spells. But one of the biggest uses of Faharn is to gain an advantage in the arena. There are four advantages that players bid for: position, initiative, climate, and menace. Players bid Faharn points in an auction for each advantage. If there’s a tie (even a tie at zero), all tied players pay their bids and roll dice to see who wins.
Position is how far apart the characters stand. Distance is marked on the arena card by a small black rectangle on the each side of the card. Players mark their position by placing their character’s position card next to their chosen mark. If characters are in the same space, they are in contact. One space apart, they are at medium range, and two spaces apart (on opposite sides of the card), they are at long range. The winner of the position auction decides the order in which players will choose their position, giving him or her the opportunity to decide how far away their character will stand from an opponent.
Initiative was described above. The winner of this auction gets the initiative card and gets to go first (and in multi-player games, decide the order of the remaining players, at least until he or she loses the initiative card). Climate permits the winner to play a Climate card, if desired. These cards modify combat conditions: for example, Bright Sunshine increases all characters’ accuracy with thrown and missile weapons. Finally, the menace auction permits the winner to put a card on an opponent. The menace card has no direct effect, but as long as that character has one or more menace cards, they cannot discard other bad effect cards, such as damaged armor, a weak position in combat, or a hostile spell.
That’s the body of the game. The rules are dense, in a sixty-seven page rulebook (actually double that, because that’s just the English half—the other half is in French) and teeny-tiny print. But they are thorough, easy to navigate, and they direct you to a tutorial on the game’s website which speeds up the learning process.
Adventures
Arena combats are simple, one card Adventures, where the object is to be the last one standing. Adventure decks provide more variety and longer games. As in a combat, the first card of an adventure provides the setting rules: the objective of the adventure (such as safely escorting a non-player character from one location to another), how much equipment characters can have, how many cards to choose for your hand, and what will be auctioned before the adventure begins.
The rest of the cards in the adventure deck are shuffled and put into piles based on the number printed on the back of the card: for example, you might create six piles of two cards each, a “2” card and a “1” card underneath it. In play, your character moves to a pile and flips the top card, usually a location. (Arenas were location cards, so locations work the same way as an arena.) If there are multiple characters at a location, you must fight, but if you’re allies or alone, you may attempt to Explore the location by rolling against a challenge. Each location has its own challenge for exploration, such as your character’s Move score – 20. If you succeed, you can flip the card underneath, which may be a monster to fight, an ally to assist you, a relic which can be picked up, and so on. Your characters will explore the sites and fight until you satisfy the adventure’s objective and win the game.
There are a few new rules for the adventure game. One is that your characters can retreat from locations during a battle and return to their sanctuaries to heal. This can be done conventionally by disengaging from a battle, or magically. Another rule shows the power of these characters as champions of the four alignments of Corunea: if they are killed, their character card is returned to a sanctuary card. Players need multiple sanctuaries for an adventure, because returning from the dead forces a player to discard one sanctuary card, and the character regenerates in one of their remaining sanctuaries. Should the character have no sanctuary to recover in, they die at last.
The first, and so far, only adventure deck available contains three different adventures. Since the card order is different each time you play, and players can switch characters and customize their decks, the adventure deck offers more play value than just three games. Creative players may even be able to create their own adventures by coming up with new objectives and different combinations of cards.
Conclusion
What do I like about Corunea? I think the combat system looks like fun, and there’s plenty of replay value as you select different cards, attempt different strategies, or modify your deck. The Adventure game provides a nifty framework for setting up different battles and different combinations of characters, and also looks like fun. The cards are beautiful to look at, and the Corunea world has enough depth and mystery to it that I look forward to exploring it and learning more. Arenas and adventures are rated for how long they should take to play, from about fifteen minutes to a single game lasting hours, although most of the time increase is from having more players. The designers have also been very clever in how the game is physically put together. I’ve mentioned before how the card backs permit you to keep track of life and Faharn points, so that there’s no need to use life stones—in fact, doing so would distort the game, as you’d go through your deck more slowly. The designers have also put a die icon on each page of the rulebook, so that in a pinch, you could flip through the book and pick numbers at random if you didn’t have dice, although that would make the game very slow indeed. Cards are numbered and have a version number on them, so as they get updated in later editions, you can easily see which cards need to be replaced.
What don’t I like? Well, even though collectable card games put a lot of excitement into building your deck, if you have your heart set on a particular character, you may have trouble getting the cards you need to make that character viable. You should probably plan on buying multiple starter packs to build your first character, too. While the starters have 71 cards, a legal Corunea character must have fifty to sixty cards in their deck, with no duplicate cards. Starter decks give you only enough to flesh out one of the two characters enclosed. Each player will need, at the minimum, their own starter pack.
My two biggest disappointments are not the fault of Insight, but my longing for a slightly different game than they designed. I like games with lots of background details, and while Corunea appears to have a fully fleshed out back story, the designers have only released tidbits of the world on the web site. I’d like more detail on the races, the four powers, and the history of the world. I was also hoping this would be more of a role playing game, maybe one that permitted good solitaire play, but as designed, the role card game is about combat, not exploration. It can be played solitaire, but I’m sure it will be even more fun when I’m taken by surprise by an opponent’s clever play. Again, these are not the fault of the game, but of my expectations.
I don’t think this game is for everybody. There’s a bit of a learning curve, and the thickness of the rules and the teeny-tiny print does not inspire beginners to leap right in. The English translation of the rules is very good, although there are just enough minor errors here and there to remind you that the game is translated from French. They are no more distracting than typical typographical errors, and do not lead to problems in learning the rules.
If you’re not interested in a potentially addictive game that might lead you back into counting up your loose change to buy one more booster, you should probably stay away. But if you want a combat-heavy fantasy game that permits you to explore an exotic and beautiful new world, with promises of more adventures to come, then pick up Corunea. I’ve waited a long time to see this game, and I have not been disappointed by the reality. I look forward to many hours of play with this game, as soon as I can scare up some players. And watch out for the Mezai Warden: she’s a lot tougher than she looks!
